Worship - February 2021
Have you ever found yourself thinking that the Christian life would be easier if it could just be distilled down into a simple list of rules to be followed? To be honest, I have. Maybe you’re not drawn to this kind of thinking, but there are definitely days when I am. Following Christ is complicated, and it seems like if I could just focus on guarding my actions closely enough then I would be in a pretty good place. This is in fact the thought process behind literally every other religion in the world, and the problem with it is that it doesn’t even come close to giving God what He has actually asked of us. God wants so much more from you than just your hands. He wants your heart. Don’t get me wrong, God cares very deeply about what we do with our hands, but He is in no way impressed by our good deeds (or lack of bad deeds) if our hearts are not loving Him above everything else.
This morning I was reading in Mark chapter 7, which recounts one of the many instances where the pharisees oppose Jesus and the actions of his disciples. Now, in this particular passage, the Pharisees were attempting to rebuke Jesus for not following the “traditions of the elders”. We could spend all day talking about how they should have been concerned about the Law of God instead of the tradition of the elders, and Jesus himself harshly rebukes them for “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men”. The Pharisees were not lazy. They were hard at work trying to commit acts of righteousness. However, their problem was twofold. Not only were they following the wrong set of rules, they were following the rules for the wrong reasons. Jesus confronted them saying, “Well did Isaiah prophecy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’” (Mark 7:6-7). They were following the commands of men instead of the doctrines of God, and to make matters worse, their hearts were far from God.
So the Pharisees in this passage claimed that they were worshipping God, but they were doing the wrong things, and they weren’t even doing them for the right reasons. However, even if we are doing the right things, we are no closer to worshipping God if we are doing them for the wrong reasons. Psalm 51:16-17 makes this clear, “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Isn’t God the one who commanded the sacrifices and burnt offerings? Of course, but God is first and foremost concerned with our hearts, and what we truly love. No wonder all the law and the prophets are summed up in these two commands: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22:37-40). If our hearts are captivated with love for God, then our hands will follow in like fashion.
So how do we know the condition of our hearts? How do we know if we love God supremely above anything else, or just covering up the wickedness in our hearts with good deeds? Bob Kauflin encourages us to ask ourselves these questions: “What do I enjoy the most? What do I spend the most time doing? Where does my mind drift to when I don’t have anything to do? What am I passionate about? What do I spend my money on? What makes me angry when I don’t get it? What do I feel depressed without? What do I fear losing the most?” (Worship Matters, p. 26). These questions can be very revealing of the condition of our heart because they can help us to see in what we find our pleasure, our joy, and our hope, and if the answers to these questions is anything other than God, then we have a serious worship problem.
The great hymn writer Isaac Watts put it this way, “The Great God values not the service of men, if the heart be not in it: The Lord sees and judges the heart; he has no regard to outward forms of worship, if there be no inward adoration, if no devout affection be employed therein. It is therefore a matter of infinite importance, to have the whole heart engaged steadfastly for God.”
True worship is a matter both of outward acts of obedience and internal love for God. 1 Corinthians 10:31 does not say “whether you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do it all without sinning.” The command is much more profound than that. We are instructed to do it all “to the glory of God,” and we cannot rightly glorify God without obeying his command to love Him with all of our being. No set of rules could ever bring about such an inward adoration for the Lord. No amount of strict adherence to laws (whether biblical or extra-biblical) can make up for a heart that loves the things of the world rather than God.
